Showing results by author "Shaun Whiteside" in All Categories

The Nazis presented themselves as warriors against moral degeneracy. Yet, as Norman Ohler's gripping best seller reveals, the entire Third Reich was permeated with drugs: cocaine, heroin, morphine and, most of all, methamphetamines, or crystal meth, used by everyone from factory workers to housewives, and crucial to troops; resilience - even partly explaining German victory in 1940.

In 1965, the German journalist Horst Krüger attended the Auschwitz trial in Frankfurt, where 22 former camp guards were put on trial for the systematic murder of more than one million men, women and children. Twenty years after the end of the war, this was the first time that the German people were confronted with the horrific details of the Holocaust executed by 'ordinary men' still living in their midst.

The year is 1919. Walter Benjamin flees his overbearing father to scrape a living as a jobbing critic. Ludwig Wittgenstein signs away his inheritance to teach schoolchildren in a provincial Austrian village, seeking spiritual clarity. Martin Heidegger renounces his faith and aligns his fortunes with the phenomenological school of Edmund Husserl. Ernst Cassirer sketches a new schema of human culture at the back of a cramped Berlin tram. The stage is set for a great intellectual drama, which will unfold over the next decade.

A dramatic and revelatory new account of the final days in Hitler's bunker, based on new access to previously unseen Soviet archives, previously unseen materials and cutting edge forensics.

Germany, 1918: a country in flux. The First World War is lost, traditional values are shaken to their core, revolution is afoot and the victory of democracy beckons. Everything must change with the times. The country is abuzz with talk of the 'new woman', the 'new man', 'new living' and 'new thinking'. What follows is the establishment of the Weimar Republic, an economic crisis and the transformation of Germany. A triumphant procession of liberated lifestyles emerges.

Maigret savoured the sensations of his youth again: the cold, stinging eyes, frozen fingertips, an aftertaste of coffee. Then, stepping inside the church, a blast of heat, soft light; the smell of candles and incense. The last time Maigret went home to the village of his birth was for his father's funeral. Now an anonymous note predicting a crime during All Souls' Day mass draws him back there, where troubling memories resurface and hidden vices are revealed. Georges Simenon was born in Liège, Belgium, in 1903.

Cesare is 77 years old, a widower and cynical troublemaker, a man who has always had trouble caring for others and has given up trying. Aside from an intermittent fling with a mature nurse called Rossana, who moonlights as a sex worker, he prefers to live his own life, avoiding contact with his neighbors and even his own children wherever possible. Until one day, the enigmatic Emma moves into the neighboring flat.